


Missing Islands

by seitsensarvi



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Universe, Demons, Denial, Guilt, M/M, Nightmares, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 21:13:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11677185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seitsensarvi/pseuds/seitsensarvi
Summary: He played with toy-soldiers on borderless lands for a little while. He traced the walls last.





	Missing Islands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [35grams (caxxe)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/gifts).



“Strike a deal with me”, he heard himself say, assured as if it was the first time, as if it was the last. He hadn't known the price for his recklessness, doubted he might never repay his debt in full and he begun to wonder if hell lended loans, if hell could even last long enough for him to try.

Sun burned its first rays on the horizon. The footsteps were light. They woke him, yet, merciful, barely woke the dead ever thrashing about just beneath the surface. Sun enflamed the horizon, low, too low to bring anything but cold where they were nested along the shadows of the wall. 

The commander opened an eye. Blue chased red but dawn blue was no match for an ocean was always too faint to properly wash crimson away. The captain would have disapproved of so sloppy a job. Stains remained the corners, rotted in the folds. The footsteps came closer. 

“Again?” the captain asked. 

“Again,” he replied. 

He thought not to inquire what the man was either doing up and about and uniform-clad in the early hours of morning. It was too easy an out. He deserved better than that. 

Levi rounded the desk. A breath of wind hit Erwin's back. He blessed the forethought that had made him remove his jacket at least when he saw that ink had dried on his white sleeves far quicker than on the pages. He concealed the offending sight with a twist of the wrist as if he would rather face beasts than the captain's remarks.

He had learnt the beasts.

But Levi said no more. He left as he had come and Erwin to wonder how silence could hold so many words without ever needing to speak them aloud, to wonder why the captain's coming said more than Erwin knew to reply to and it was unsettling that he wished he could have defended himself better than he had, when there had been no attack. 

Lies had already started blooming on his tongue. 

He returned to the habit in the same breath like he dared not contradict the thought. Methodically he completed the night's work, tiredness still numbing the tips of his fingers as he flipped the last figures in the upcoming budget request. They had never needed more gas for expeditions than for training, never saved gas so much as during expeditions but he needed to twist, to conceal. He would lie again when he'd remind his men to bring bodies back if they were able to spare the time, just this once, and it wasn't for any family's closure so much as to salvage supplies. 

The commander thanked the practised detachment that allowed him not to pause and consider for too long whether it was too grim an omen whenever a set of blades and wires passed between three separate pairs of hands in a row without so much as a scratch. He had yet to announce the recent cuts.

The losses added up regardless. They weighed heavier as he went, faces becoming names becoming numbers becoming faces once more whenever he forgot and he was guilty when they died, he was guilty when they left his mind chased by more pressing concerns and he was guilty again when they came back asking if they had at least done their duty, if they had mattered.

Erwin discarded the shirt when he was done, slumber still in the creases. 

As if he could have guessed from a few nights lost to a desk and a few mornings beginning before sunrise, the captain did not slip out of his sight. 

Not when the council sat and sealed their fate with nothing more committal than the raise of a hand and he saw Levi's scowl for days and he had not known it could ever look so kind.

Not the next time they charged and he should have been unable to tell in the fury of the ride but still the captain appeared at the corner of his eye, his flying form or the sun's shimmer on the steel at his hand, once, before they retreated and he knew the man's exact position in the formation as he did all his men's only he also knew as surely as he trusted the days to pass that Levi would cross the gates behind him then disappear then come back with nightfall. 

Erwin didn't think so highly of his own abilities as to believe he had the means to always watch, or even the time, but the captain wouldn't let himself slip out of his sight.

Levi did not leave either when workload tripled and they sat through too many hours on too many nights, cold then colder but the captain never remarked on the chill, on the lack of wood to replace ash or the too few lamps and the too dim light.

It came as a surprise when he would utter the simplest requests, pass the ink sign there hand me the other half, curt orders never softened but for the low tone of his voice. He hardly spoke more than necessary in battle and private moments alike, and it had Erwin rethink his every word, he who used his speech so generously and he who knew to use it to convince but with Levi it didn't work, had never worked and just like that he was free to stay silent and forget to lie. 

Pens scratched unsynchronized over formatted files. It should have been easier when words were this purposefully impersonal, name place of birth cause of death, no closer to the heart than another ration order yet the commander noticed how the captain went through his stash rarely ever asking for confirmation on a rank or a name like he too knew them all. 

Several times, Erwin had expected him to leave for the night, and still he didn't go before the sun had played a reprise and burned a line on the horizon over the remnants of their candle's flame, and this time they greeted it both. Only when the commander had protested, sheer force of habit, and the captain had replied it couldn't possibly matter this late and the fallen soldiers would remain so without a care that the death notices were on time did his footseps retreat, no longer so light.

Erwin let him go. 

He chased fatigue away from the arch of his shoulders and went to grant some rest to his tired eyes and he lied once more when he insisted it was for his own sake and he wanted to and he cared to try.

Narrow alleys closed around him. They trapped him between their bleeding walls. Erwin tossed and turned and resigned himself to an imitation of sleep. He couldn't offer anything else, couldn't afford more. The price to pay was too high but the captain had left, the captain wouldn't know. 

Erwin muttered his apologies in near silence as if anyone speaking not-words were here to hear them at all, for his failed attempt or perhaps it was again for robbing his men, this man, of their lives and not being able to relent until he'd stolen them all. He rose and buried the one unforgiveable fact. He left to find quieter demons to bargain with, but when he entered his office short hours later there was not a single notice left for him to write.

White paper sands spread out under the commander's gaze. Salt dried on his skin; the waves had almost taken him. Ink seas were never calm when he poured them out from his books to his hand to his maps. He imagined them roaring. 

He kept looking for home in old volumes' pages and faraway shores. He looked at the world he'd created and he found he could not tell where home was. He wondered if he had forgotten, or if he had never known.

Erwin lifted his fingers to disperse clouds on skies unknown, and he wished upon still nameless stars that the folly of a single man could ever be so great as to be worthy of the height of hope and the senselessness of pain and the most terrible of sacrifices. Waves should take him when they met. He was sure that when they'd finally meet it would be the right time, the only time. 

He played with toy-soldiers on borderless lands for a little while. He traced the walls last. 

“We suffered too many casualties,” he said eventually.

“They know what we're up against,” the shadows replied.

“Do they really?”

The captain lifted an eyebrow. “Do you?” 

Erwin smiled a humorless smile. There were too many who would see him hang before the next sunrise. It hadn't mattered so much with his father. It seemed curious that it would matter now.

“To civilians it looks like we're taking the bread from their children's mouths, all to feed dead men. I can't fault them.”

The commander took out a new piece of paper. He traced the walls first.

“They think you'd remove every fucking brick from fucking Maria with your bare hands to prove it could fall again. Don't let them have that.”

He traced all three walls.

“We shouldn't rule out any option.”

In the very middle he placed Sina.

“So what, sponspors'll cut funding until we starve?”

Then, with a twist of his pen, he crossed it.

“Something like that.”

Levi came closer, a frown hardening his face. “That's not a formation plan.”

“It isn't.”

“Erwin, you can't be serious.”

The commander lifted his eyes. “Can't I?” 

Square glass panes cast crosses on the captain's shirt. He kept looking down at the map like the circles would reply.

“They'll cut your stupid head before you even lift the knife.”

“Who talked of knives?”

“Anyone who knows the first thing about assassination.”

“Then can I trust anyone to make sure my head at least doesn't roll off too far?”

“You think I'd stand and watch.”

“I think they would make you hold the blade if they had half the chance. But there won't be any of those. We can't afford them either way.”

“Damn cuts, huh?”

“We have to play it the way they do, so they don't have a choice,” Erwin said, tearing the paper down to scraps.

“At it again with brand new pieces. Play carefully, commander.” 

Perhaps it was the absence of the strong protest he had expected that made Erwin feel bold enough to ask Levi what he would really do when he falls. Catch, the captain replied. This once, Erwin did not only wonder if childhood dreams would be able to carry him as far as he needed to. This once, he also wondered if Levi would.

Frost finished settling on every windowsil of the compound, yet even winter came to pass. The captain's injury took longer.

The commander slept for so long he thought he might have caught up on all the rest he had avoided. He slept for so long he thought he had died.

The dreams were no different then, if he evaded the way he wasn't sure they would ever end. He was vaguely aware of sound and light on the other side of his eyelids, trapped and stuck as he was inside a body so frail it wouldn't register as his own. He'd borrowed a body and it was failing. He'd borrowed every single fallen soldier's body and they let him taste how decay felt on muscles and skin, let him see the neverending dark.

The sea was as black as ink again but the raging waves were no more. The toy-soldiers had drowned, he had drowned them all. 

Erwin woke up at last.

Levi didn't leave. He shaved along Erwin's jaw with an attention he'd have thought reserved for surgery. He dressed his wounds, dressed him up in the morning. He had done the same while he slept, the surgeon told him. Though ashamed, the commander was thankful, for the commander felt commander no more except when small hands fell on him for too short measures of time and made him look like himself again, like he remembered, like before. 

If he had been brave, Erwin would have asked them to be rougher.

Levi started to leave only when he was sure he could come back to find at worst a light fever to wipe off the commander's brow, instead of a corpse. 

The captain spoke even less now, but he watched more. He watched as if he still didn't entirely believe that Erwin could be hurt or human or alive, and he wached as if Erwin would disappear if he so much as averted his eyes. At times, Erwin thought he might. He still disappeared several times a day only to come back drenched in a sweat that for long seconds inevitably felt like his own blood. 

His own blood a torrent, a storm.

He knew he must have screamed in his sleep for his lungs rattled every morning, his throat ribbons, his voice glass shards. He hadn't meant to hurt the captain with the sharp pieces the first time he said he'd paid too small a price with one arm, and he said it with a smile. 

Erwin started to take the not-formation plans out more and more. He had stopped tearing through them after he'd drawn the lines. They used up most of his time though he missed the simplest motion, the smallest action after so long a time, but all his energy was used up thinking and thinking and thinking to the point he thought he could not have stood up even for the weight newly discarded, even if he had tried.

One limb had seemed so light when it had first been teared off, yet since it was gone he would always lean slightly to the opposite side. The commander talked not of the way the missing arm still hurt all the way up invisible nerves, how the missing hand still attempted to grip and grasp, how the first time he washed the unfamiliar body on his own he fell into the void at his right; the first time, and the dozen after.

Instead he would only talk to ask Hange about every single detail of every single happening in the world outside the frontiers of his room whenever they visited. He would ask the nurses for more pens often, more oil. When the nurses wouldn't comply, any soldier who passed by. 

Though bedridden, Erwin marched towards his one goal with broader strides. If it happened that he lost his breath, the captain walked for him.

Erwin worried at the amplitude of the work the man shouldered. Levi didn't let him be careful like he tried to be with the other soldiers. Levi never showed the slightest hesitation, jumped as high, flew as fast, went as far as Erwin wanted without a second guess and still he demanded nothing, and still he would carry out the most gruesome task no matter that he hated it, only because Erwin asked.

Each time, he exceeded his expectations. Each time he found his own contentment in nothing more than Erwin's satisfaction or a kind word, and Erwin would have given him the world, would have praised him until he could take no more if it would have begun to compare with the extent of what the man deserved. 

If he could have found his voice.

When the queen was crowned, the captain watched not her. He watched the man hiding behind, and Erwin guessed it might have been foolish to think he'd stop at anything before he'd given him what he wished for, felt like he would have made Erwin king himself if that was what he'd wanted. 

The commander thought to ask only later, in the flickering glow of a locked room not his, in the unusual dizziness of alcohol-loosened muscles, or perhaps it was the ghost of long-removed chains at his wrist that still made him feel so off balance.

“How much on my head now?” he asked.

Levi was swallowed up by the dark shapes on the walls if he moved at all. He passed through them uncaring.

“Never seen a man's worth dwindle so fast. Shit investment you are.” 

The captain paced about him, near and the next moment far. He couldn't stay in place. Erwin smiled.

“A pity. You could have bought yourself a house.”

“Could've bought your ass a grave.”

“It's no use if you spend the reward on me. I don't need a resting place.”

“Yeah? Me neither.”

Erwin rested his back fully against his chair. He counted the seconds fall; the footsteps, close then gone. Gone, too far.

“Come here,” he tried.

Levi had reached the door. “What for?”

“Nothing.”

Levi turned around.

When he was close enough, Erwin took all of his fingers in his only hand. He repeated, “Nothing at all.”

“Alright,” Levi said, but soon he was digging his nails into the palm, soon he cursed and gripped and held tight. Erwin watched him appear, watched his fine features turn to the light.

He watched him soften when he brought his bruised lips to bruised knuckles, once. 

“Alright.” 

Erwin remembered to breathe. Perhaps it wouldn't take all of what little air seemed to remain in the room between them. Perhaps they could share.

He couldn't help but wonder how much he would pay for this, too, the gift invaluable each time Levi had needed to peel yet another layer off his beating heart for him alone, inestimable when the man would one day fall for his sake and he, with his one arm and the burden he carried, would certainly fail to catch him the way the captain always had. 

He added a line to the ever-growing list for every word, every touch, every piece offered or taken and never given back. It would cost him the entire world when Levi discarded all he still had, and Erwin could not even promise him the smallest scrap of peace, the faintest sparkle of sunlight. Levi's hands burned his skin. He released them too fast.

The man regarded him with only confusion in his eyes. It scalded Erwin whiter than the touch he couldn't hold. He had made a mistake, long before he'd spoken.

He had never asked what Levi wanted. He had made guesses often, had never found the courage to inquire straight on but he knew the answer. He couldn't bear to know the answer.

He wasn't a brave man.

The commander could do little else other than dismiss his captain as softly as he could, hoping that he would go, that he would retreat to the room next door or to the edge of the world, as far as he wanted.

Levi didn't go far. They were back at headquarters the next day and neither spoke again of the night. Some things were meant to stay hidden in the dancing shadows of locked rooms' walls. Some things needed to remain buried at all times.

For the sake of staying upright a little longer, Erwin buried more. He expanded the foundations beneath him with the loudest thoughts, the ones that used up too much space to let him plan like he needed to, so that they would serve him right. He buried many. 

He buried too much. 

Carefulness had gone, had been abandoned, had been forgotten. Erwin did not care to know when it had happened. He found he finally could hide the frailty of the body with armor around the heart, and it was this much easier when he could ward off the crippling guilt just enough, until he pretended so seamlessly he nearly pitied he had not brought those walls up long before.

Suns burned the same day after day and he saw them not. The captain came back with every rising dawn, and he saw him not. Erwin kept his eyes shut tight to complete the picture in his mind, single wing spread out wider than it ever had for the first time again. For the last.

He could not have noticed how soon they too crumbled. He could not have seen he'd built trembling bridges upon sinking grounds. He should have seen, if not in the soldiers' renewed will to push forward at the words that came out of his mouth, assured like never before, then in one man's own when they chilled him to the bone. In his own laugh ripping his throat. 

Rocks tore through sky and earth and flesh alike. The last of the commander's wishes slipped, sand through his fingers, with each blow that landed, each deafening scream. The truth he sought seemed too immense to carry on top of the world, now; too great for a man. He had stolen too much, lied too much. Hoped too much. 

He'd gone so fast towards the end he realized a second too late that the end had come towards him just the same, confident like a promise. In none of his plans had he thought he would see it approach the way he did now, at once so drawn out and so quick, and he wondered if he had ever stood a chance, or if he hadn't been the toy-soldier all along, the paper dream. 

Silhouettes moved around him but Erwin wasn't dreaming. They would talk if he took the time to listen and he could hear them say, eyes soft, fist thumping on pulseless chests as if it had been nothing that they would do it all over again and Erwin would have begged them to stop, begged them to see how hideous he had become, to pretend he could not feel with them, cry with them, mourn with them, and believe it. 

He shouldn't have spared the time to listen. He did nonetheless. The captain's eyes did not leave him. 

The captain's eyes had never left him for as long as he'd walked alongside him and Erwin had gotten used to the sight, had gotten so used to be seen he had turned blind. 

He saw him, real, when Levi kneeled the way himself had kneeled a lifetime before, and Erwin couldn't understand why he did it. It was never the captain's place to lower himself before him. It was never the captain's place to offer his heart again and again like it wasn't a gift Erwin had never dared taking. 

Erwin discarded down to the last of his doubts to lay out at his feet. He owed it to the man to show himself, once at least, as naked as truth, as raw as the book-oceans he would never meet. 

He had not watched a birds' flight in years. He had not looked up at the sky and felt warmth on his skin in centuries. 

For just a moment he wondered how peace would look on Levi's face when he would find it, how the early morning light would shine in his hair when he was no longer here to see it.

Levi would walk for him a little longer, if he asked. He could reach the fire mountains, taste the rain falling over endless valleys; smell the wind on the farthest island, on the coldest night. If he would take Erwin's fears, he could throw them all instead of his ashes, into the depths of the sea.

Erwin did not have to ask. Levi took it all, dreams and fears, blood and storms.

Levi his blood, his storm.

The commander could not allow the moment to stretch. The commander had to go. Before he rose, he remembered a man once telling him everything he had to tell with little more than silence. He thanked him in as few words as he could, like Levi had taught him. 

Erwin saw the red flood surge again, the lightning white pain ignite again. He saw hell all over again until it eased, after a few seconds or an eternity. He couldn't tell. He was gone. He should have been gone. 

He felt small, strong arms carry him close and lay him down as if to rest. He felt lips brush against the drying blood on his temple, at the seams of his skin. 

“Strike a deal with me,” he heard Levi say, low in his ear.


End file.
